[3] During his career, he created portrait busts of prominent British and American political and military figures, including, Alexander Hamilton in 1794 and George Washington the following year, in 1795.

He went to London in 1773, armed with a letter of introduction from Matthew Nulty, an English antiquarian and amateur sculptor in Rome,[4] and worked under Agostino Carlini, a founding member of the Royal Academy.

He befriended Johann Wolfgang von Goethe during the German poet's Grand Tour in Italy in 1786 - 1788, as they dwelled in the same building in Via del Corso where Ceracchi had his atelier/house.

James Madison, a Founding Father, drily remarked that the sculptor "was an enthusiastic worshipper of Liberty and Fame, and his whole soul was bent on securing the latter by rearing a monument to the former".

During his two American visits, he developed heroic portrait busts[16] of leaders of the American Revolution, including Benjamin Franklin (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts), John Jay (Supreme Court, Washington DC), Thomas Jefferson (Monticello),[17] George Washington with a Roman haircut and a toga (Metropolitan Museum of Art,[18] George Clinton, again presented as a noble Roman (twice, Boston Atheneum and New-York Historical Society), and Alexander Hamilton.

In Rome he entered with fiery vehemence into the projected Italian Republic under revolutionary French auspices, when Joseph Bonaparte arrived in the city in 1797, drawing Jacobin sympathizers to him.